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Yeah, this took me a while to post, sorry about that. I’ve been so busy since BlogWorld a couple weeks ago, I’ve barely had the chance to sleep.

BlogWorld was awesome, as was Las Vegas in general. I had a great time, and I hope everyone else who attended did as well. I got to meet some really cool people there who I’ve talked to online quite a bit but never actually met in person.

Here are some quick reviews from some of the folks I was proud to hang out with (in no particular order):

Everyone I met there was so cool, even more than I expected. John Chowtook us out for a much appreciated dinner at Benihanna Japanese Steakhouse (photos to come,) I got a chance to meet the great Zac Johnson, who I didn’t expect to be there, that was a surprise. What a cool guy! I met Vinay and Anthony from CarZi and MadWhips, who I also didn’t expect to be there. The guys from Unique Blog Designs, who are currently working on a theme for me had a booth there, and I think they got a ton of business from walk-ups and word-of-mouth.

Anyway I’m going to get my photos situated and put up another post here soon, so stay tuned!

Well, I got in to Vegas last night, walked around on the strip for a while, it’s definitely an interesting place I came in to BlogWorld this morning (a bit late) and Matt Mullenweg was being interviewed. In case you didn’t know, Matt is the original developer of WordPress, and his company Automattic has created Akismet (the blog spam filter,) and some other great products.

Matt had some interesting things to say, and he’s a very smart fella. I’ll post more about it later, they just opened up the vendor floor…

I’m packing my bags for BlogWorld Expo, taking off tonight and will be there first thing in the morning. I’m really looking forward to meeting some fellow bloggers and friends like Nate, Danielle, John, Jeremy, Gary, my friends from Copeac, and so many more! I’ll update the blog when I can, I’m sure they will have wi-fi

Sadly, I won’t have much time to do much else while I’m there, since I’ll be going to PostieCon too, and my flight leaves at 6AM Sunday morning.

One of my sites got on the front page of Digg a couple weeks ago, and I was interested to see the final results on this. Finally everything seems to have evened out again, and with some decent (and interesting) results. There were actually a few surprising results according to my analytics software. I might go over some more details in a different post, but here’s a brief run-down of some of the results that had an impact:

RSS readers increased from 650-ish to around 830 on average

Within a few hours of hitting the front page, Digg users consumed almost 24 GB of bandwidth

The story hit front page around 7PM, and traffic was higher the next day. I attribute this to the links back and distribution of the link throughout Digg

AdSense earnings increased 250% for about 3 days and have slowly dwindled back to normal, or slightly higher

Total Digg visitors for those few days: 34,186

Alexa rank didn’t increase very much, possibly due to the fact that not many Digg users actually use the Alexa toolbar.

Artificially reducing the PageRank and importance of sites just because they’re selling links is absurd. I understand why they did it, but they’re not doing it the right way. For the love of God, they dinged Forbes something like 2 or 3 PageRanks. Are they any less of a reliable source just because they sell links? Absolutely not, yet Google is considering them reduced importance, as well as many other big name sites. They reduced ProBlogger.net’s PageRank from 6 to 4. They’re still the leading source of blogging tips and information. But not according to Google, because they inter-linked their blog network.

The speculation as to why the sites were “dinged” is all over the board, and we don’t know that it’s for the above reasons. However, this point still remains:

One of Google’s main problems is that they’re artificially manipulating results. This is ridiculous. For example, let’s say you’re looking for JohnChow.com but are for some reason searching on Google. If you type in “John Chow” the first result is some lame review of JohnChow.com, not the actual website. You won’t even find it on the first few pages! Are you freaking kidding me? If somebody is searching for John Chow, they obviously want the John Chow home page, and Google doesn’t give it to them. Google used to rant on about how the user experience is #1, but that is clearly just bullshit to make themselves sound better. Artificially manipulating results like this degrades the user experience, and it’s all because they want to whine about paid links? I used to be a raving Google fan, but not nearly as much anymore.

Google has pissed off most of the blogosphere by dropping PageRank of many of the blogs on the internet. Some say it’s because they were selling links, some say they were network inter-linking, and there were plenty of other guesses, but the truth is, nobody knows for sure. Regardless, PageRank has all but completely lost it’s value.

What are we to do? I say we stop conforming to what Google tells us to do and take a first step by removing all ‘nofollow’ tags from our links. This was Google’s method of scaring us by telling us we had to add this tag to all paid links and all comments, and all sites not vouched for, blahblahblah. Screw it. Removing this tag could alter Google’s search results in a negative way, perhaps reminding Google not to bite the hand that feeds them (webmasters.)

Is Google on a decline? Perhaps, I’ve noticed their search results are nowhere close to as good as they used to be, and Yahoo and MSN have really gained some market share in search.

If Google keeps this crap up, they’re going to kill themselves, plain and simple. Webmasters keep them afloat. Stabbing us in the back like this is going to do nothing but piss us off. Maybe I should stop using AdSense completely. I’ve already started using Yahoo search more, and for the first time, it’s more accurate than Google. Maybe it’s all some sort of master plan? Who knows, but I do know that Google sucks at communication and customer relations. Just let us know what’s going on! What’s so difficult about that?

I’m certainly not one to normally write about this on this blog, but something you may not know about me is that I’m very much into the real estate market. It’s one of the best ways to make lots of money and more importantly, passive income.

There have been too many banks granting mortgages to under qualified people. There have been way too many people buying their homes on adjustable-rate mortgages because the low initial rate seems attractive. The interest rate always goes up, and since most Americans live above their means already, they live paycheck-to-paycheck. They don’t even have a chance to refinance at a lower rate. When the interest rate inflates on their mortgage, they can no longer afford the payments, and are forced to foreclose. Mostly because us Americans feel it necessary to keep up with the Jones’, but at least part of it can be remedied by only taking out Fixed Rate Mortgages.

There are more foreclosures than there’s ever been. That’s a bad thing, but it brings about some opportunities for investors. Buying property at foreclosure and pre-foreclosure is a great way to get some property on the cheap, and can even help the previous owners save their credit in some cases. The only problem with buying at foreclosure is that you must have the full cash amount available to purchase the property. Continue reading ‘How to Profit From the Current Housing Market’